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This literal vs. nonliteral model had the considerable advantage of emphasizing that discrepancies between what the Book of Nature teaches and what the Bible appears to say were not settled by two warring factions. It was a real debate, and it went on in the minds of the scientists themselves. It was not imposed from the outside. It answered a genuine need to come to terms with the fact that the two books were written by the same Author, who clearly intended them to be complementary.

Kenneth J. Howell, who is professor of religious studies and director of the John Henry Newman Institute of Catholic Thought at the Universilty of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, argues in God's Two Books that we must take a further step. The literal vs. nonliteral model is too simplistic and, more seriously, it lumps a wide variety of players into two distinct camps.

The sensus literalis had been discussed by Saint Augustine in his De Doctrina Christiana, which was the most influential manual of hermeneutical theory and practice for many centuries. Augustine did not draw a simple distinction between the literal and the nonliteral sense but often glossed the sensus literalis as sensus historicus to stress that the meaning intended by the biblical author should be interpreted according to the rules of grammar and the facts of history as they were known at the time.

The notion of the author's intention became central to subsequent hermeneutical theory, and this raised the question of how to discern what the divine author intended behind the human words. Ambrose of Milan, Augustine's mentor, had read the first chapter of Genesis as a journalistic account of what actually happened during the first six natural days. Augustine held a more subtle view and maintained that the language of Genesis was adapted to the weak understanding of humans, who could not easily grasp that the totality of the material world was created in an instant of time at the beginning. For Augustine, there is an underlying inscrutability of the created order, and all the interpreters of Genesis can do is offer plausible readings of the text. What is important is to show what interpretations are not acceptable—for instance, the error of portraying God as an incompetent laborer who needed six days to finish his job.

Historians have attended too exclusively to the Galileo affair, a tree with endless ramifications, to see the forest as a whole. The contribution of scientists who belonged to the Protestant Reformation has not received the attention it deserves, and it is one of the great merits of this book to show how rich and varied it was. Thus, instead of focusing exclusively on the effects of the new astronomy on biblical hermeneutics, Howell explores the role biblical interpretation played in the emerging cosmologies. As a model for this exercise he proposes convergent realism, an approach that suggests that the story is best told not as an instance of warfare between science and religion or opposition between fundamentalists and nonliteralists, but as the gradual recognition that the status of science had changed.

It is important to realize that the Protestant editor of Copernicus' book, Andreas Osiander, as well as the Catholic cardinal, Robert Bellarmin, still relied on the ancient view that astronomy had fulfilled its task when it properly predicted the motion of celestial objects. It was assumed that it did not and could not explain how celestial bodies actually move. Until Johann Kepler, no astronomer sought the physical cause of planetary movements. We miss something crucial if we do not recognize the transformation that occurred in the goals of astronomy from merely computing where the planets can be observed in the sky to accounting for the real cosmic system. Without the adoption of a realistic goal for astronomy, the question of the moving Earth would not have created such a stir. This added a theological dimension to astronomy, and Kepler speaks of portraying the glory of God by demonstrating the grandeur and precision of the celestial clockwork.

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